Net zero, to use the first great climate change metaphor, hasn’t got a snowflake’s chance in hell. It’s a fraudulent concept. It’s not real. It requires an heroic leap of faith, magical thinking. It cannot exist in the physical universe.
Yet it’s the centre of Australian national policy. All our state governments are signed up to it. Net zero pledges of one kind or another – albeit often over timeframes which recall a Star Trek voyage more than a policy commitment – cover, notionally, two thirds of the global economy.What does net zero mean?
It’s the idea that the world gets its total greenhouse emissions – now about 40 billion tonnes annually – down to a manageably small amount and then, by wondrous technology, takes carbon back out of the atmosphere equal to that still being emitted.
I am slightly overstating things by saying it’s absolutely impossible. It is possible if you believe in miracles. Miraculous technology may emerge which can extract vast amounts of carbon. Such technologies don’t exist today and are not in prospect. Today, net zero is impossible.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/emission-impossible-net-zero-carbon-re...International Energy Agency works closely with the UN and is all on board with the net zero zeitgeist. In its Global Energy Transitions Stocktake it recognises that “half the emission reductions needed to reach net zero come from technologies not yet on the market”. Got that? We cannot ever get to net zero unless we develop technologies that are “under development” or yet to be invented.
Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil is the author of 40 books mainly focused on outlining complex realities and dilemmas. His 2022 book How the World Really Works contains bad news for those climate activists who just want to “do something” about climate change and believe the solution is easy – just decarbonise.
The real wrench in the works,” warns Smil, is that “we are a fossil-fuelled civilisation whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.”
He is not a complete pessimist, just anchored in the reality: “Complete decarbonisation of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near miraculous technical advances.”
This is because we rely on fossil fuels not just to generate most of our electricity but to fuel our road, rail, air and sea transport, heat homes, power industry, mine minerals, create chemical and plastic products, manufacture fertilisers and grow food. While wealthy countries such as ours can make some expensive changes to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, more than half of the world’s population is still racing to get the energy it needs, massively expanding global energy demand.
“Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year,” writes Smil, “a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly eight billion inhabitants – and
it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five.”
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Coalition To Dump Australia's Climate Target (Read 5616 times)
